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Oxbow says: Henry's Mill was just one of thousands of sawmills established in Victoria (Australia) from the 1850s to the Second World War. Rather than focusing on industrial and technological aspects of the mill, Peter Davies presents a social and material history of the lives of the men, women and children living and working at the mill. Based on archaeological and historical evidence, including documentary and oral sources, he asks who the people were that moved to the mill to seek work, where they had come from and their motives for re-locating. He goes on to study their living and working conditions, hygiene, illness and injury, the supply of goods and, and markets for the timber, as well as issues of community development, isolation, integration and consumption practices within the community of Henry's Mill.